Category Archives: Administrative state

The evil Republicans have deliberately targeted Federal employees. Among the wealthiest of taxpayers, Federal swamp denizens often are situated in the highest tax bracket. But the new tax reform law reduces the top tax bracket less than the lower brackets. This is clearly discriminatory.

As proof that this targets the most deserving Federal employees, we will just cite this story from reliable CBS News proving that many Federal employees are in the top bracket. Click here. Below are some highlights, proving that Federal employees are exceedingly deserving.

The five richest counties in the United States border the Washington, D.C. area. The median family income exceeds $100,000.

9 of the top 20 richest counties are in the D.C. area.

Another report proves that the most productive Federal employees have been unfairly targeted. Click here. Some of the key points from the linked report are below.

More than 30,000 of D.C.’s best earn more than any state governor.

According to the report, the number of federal employees making $200,000 or more increased by 165 percent between fiscal 2010 and 2016. Federal employees making $150,000 or more grew by 60 percent, with the number making more than $100,000 increasing by 37 percent in the same time period.

A total of 406,960 federal employees made six-figure incomes in fiscal 2016 – that’s roughly one in five federal employees.

There is a new ‘minimum wage’ for federal bureaucrats – at 78 departments and independent agencies, the average employee made $100,000 or more.

Further proof comes from a Wall Street Journal article by the wicked Kimberley Strassel (link here, alas, for subscribers only.) Her basic points are cited below. Study them carefully so you can refute her claims. The basic problem, she says, is:

a federal workforce whose pay and benefits are completely out of whack with the private sector. A 2011 American Enterprise Institute study found federal employees receive wages 14% higher than what similar workers in the private sector earn. Factor in benefits and the compensation premium leaps to 61%.

These huge payouts are the result of automatic increases, bonuses, seniority rules and gold-plated pensions that are all but extinct in the private sector. The federal workforce is also shielded by rules that make it practically impossible to fire or discipline bad employees, to relocate talent, or to reassign duties. These protections embolden bureaucrats to violate rules. Why was Ms. Lerner allowed to retire with full benefits? Because denying them would have cost far more—and required years of effort. It’s been nearly 40 years since the last civil-service overhaul.

Next time you hear the clamor to move most Federal departments out of the swamp of D.C. and distribute them among the states they are supposed to serve, you will know what to say.

In National Review online distinguished attorney Ed Whelan comments on the legal issues underlying this disturbing situation, pointing out that the Obama administration cites its own regulations as the legal basis for its crusade on behalf of gender-identity equality. Washington, D.C.has a well entrenched governing philosophy, now called the ‘administrative state.’ Congress unconstitutionally delegates to regulatory agencies the power to create new rules, ferret out offenders, and adjudicate and assess penalties. In other words, the separation of powers – the basis of our constitutional system – has been abrogated. The danger this represents can hardly be exaggerated. It is well worth quoting below three paragraphs from Whelan’s short article.

Troglo

The bathroom wars—or, more expansively, the bathroom, locker room, and shower wars—might have an even bigger impact in next year’s elections, including in the presidential race. For all across the country the Obama administration is aggressively imposing its claim that existing laws prohibiting sex discrimination require that public school districts, as a condition of federal funding, allow boys who think they’re girls to use the public-school bathrooms, locker rooms and showers designated for girls. As a brief (see pp. 22-25) that the Obama administration filed last week in federal court makes clear, that claim rests critically on the Department of Education’s interpretation of its own regulations— regulations that the Department of Education, under the direction of a new president, would be free to revise or re-interpret.

Similarly, by a 3-2 vote—with, surprise, the three members in the majority all being Obama appointees—the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled in April that an employer engages in discrimination on the basis of sex when it bars a man who thinks he’s a woman from using female restroom facilities. Further, the EEOC majority went out of its way in a footnote to make clear its view that the employer unlawfully deprived the man of the “use of common locker and shower facilities that non-transgender employees could use.” In other words, according to the EEOC majority, it’s unlawful sex discrimination for an employer to bar a man who thinks he’s a woman from sharing locker and shower facilities with women.

It’s worth emphasizing that the Obama administration’s transgender ideology won’t accept any sort of accommodations that fall short of providing self-identified transgender individuals with full and equal access to the opposing sex’s facilities. In the case in which the Obama administration filed the brief last week, for example, the public high school had initially made an existing separate restroom available to the student and then had installed three unisex single-stall restrooms that he (and others) could use. And in the EEOC case the employee had been allowed to use a single-user “executive” restroom.